Creativity beyond innovation: Musical performance and craft

A central component of musical performance is skill and expertise, yet how is musical skill manifest, and what is its relationship to creativity? This paper seeks to demonstrate that performative creativity has been too readily connected to ‘innovation’ to the detriment of the more practical notion of ‘craft’, as proposed by Richard Sennett (2008). This division perpetuates a binary of the perceived creative affordances of improvisation and notated performance. The notion of musical performance as craft restores the relationship between skilled practice and creativity, and allows for the performer’s proactive yet pragmatic engagement with musical notation. The presentation traces the performance strategies employed by a number of performers through interviews and documentation of rehearsals and performances, in order to examine the ways in which skilled practice is developed and refined according to different contexts. Skill is necessarily technical and interpretative, rooted in the physical, developed over time and embedded in routine. The engagement between a practitioner and a tradition entails a synthesis of action, perception and prior experience. A reading of performance as craft allows for the development of skill and expertise through activities such as repetition and problem-solving, and provokes a reconsideration of the dimensions of performance that might otherwise be taken for granted. The wider objective of the paper is to suggest that skilled practice is integral to musical creativity. I propose the metaphor of the performer as craftsman rather than creative agent as a more persuasive and richer representation.

British Journal of Music Education

British Journal of Music Education, 2019

cultural geographies, 2018

This article examines the nature of skilled practice within two settings of musical performance, the rehearsal and the compositional workshop. Drawing primarily on the work of Richard Sennett and Tim Ingold, I suggest that a characterisation of musical performance as a craft practice attends to the development of skill and expertise through the performer’s physical and everyday encounters with the world and provokes a reconsideration of the dimensions of performance that might otherwise be taken for granted. The first case study addresses rhythmic coordination during a rehearsal of Four Duets for clarinet and piano (2012), composed by Edmund Finnis for Mark Simpson and Víkingur Ólafsson, and the second traces the development of instrumental techniques by composer Evan Johnson and performer Carl Rosman as they collaborate on a new work for historical basset clarinet, ‘indolentiae ars’, a medium to be kept (2015). The article makes the case for skilled practice as an improvisatory interplay between performers and the meshwork of people, objects, histories and processes which they inhabit.

The creative potential and work of the performer in new music extends from the moment of conceptualising a concert to the moment of presenting it on stage and comprises many areas between and around those two points. In this thesis I explore the nature of this activity, from the act of playing itself to the commissioning and creating of new pieces, curatorial and collaborative tasks, and the actual concert presentation. I deliberately include interrelations between performer and music promoters, composers and the audience. This leads me to further areas of investigation, namely the question of the performer's leadership, the charismatic bond with the audience and the creation of what I call "concert aura". I do not strive to offer all-purpose formulae for the "perfect concert" or for the ideal collaboration.

Creativity studies have traditionally tended to focus on the evaluation of products generated by creative people, which are categorized in various ways according to their reception and impact on society. This orientation has been advanced in various ways by including factors such as process, personality, cultural pressures. While these approaches have produced many important insights, it may be argued that the types of creativity involved in music performance involve additional aspects. Musical performance necessarily entails developing forms of bodily skill that play out in real-time interactive contexts that involve other people, musical instruments and technologies, acoustic spaces, and various socio-cultural factors. Accordingly, some scholars have recently posited relational, environmentally distributed, and cooperative models that better capture the complex nature of musical creativity in action. In this chapter, we review some key approaches to creative cognition, with a special focus on understanding creativity as it unfolds in the real-time dynamics of musical performance. In doing so, we introduce a number of concepts associated with recent work in cognitive science that may help to capture the adaptive interplay of body and environment in the co-enactment of musical events.

From the Conclusion: This paper presents a view of music performance on melodic instruments that attempts to unpack the processes of attention and awareness in expert performance. Clearly, much work remains to be done in the effort to bridge the knowledge cultures of performance and scholarly work on music. For far too long, the scholarly ideas that have dominated our view of music performance have robbed instrumentalists of their right to understand themselves as knowledgeable and creative beings. Sadly, though more and more researchers are beginning to recognize that the traditional ideas about creativity in Western Art Music are wrong (i.e. composer vs performer, orchestral music as “ossified and stilted”), efforts to correct the imbalance fall on deaf ears, and even heavy-handed academic censorship. I offer this working paper as an interim contribution seeking to engage dialog with a wider community of interested scholars. In the future, I hope we will all better understand how deeply we are connected by our ability to attend, experience, and create music together. For the latest version of this work, please see my recently published book, "Grounding the Analysis of Cognitive Processes in Music Performance: Distributed Cognition in Musical Activity" Routledge/Taylor & Francis, 2021.

World of Music, 2020

Eric F. Clarke and Mark Doffman (eds.), Distributed Creativity: Collaboration and Improvisation in Contemporary Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxvii + 349 pp., figures, tables, music examples, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199355914 (hardcover). Juniper Hill, Becoming Creative: Insights from Musicians in a Diverse World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 264 pp., figures, music examples , acknowledgments, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199365180 (pa-perback). Tina K. Ramnarine (ed.), Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 404 pp., figures , tables, music examples, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780199352227 (hardcover). Comparing Commonalities and Articulating Differences in Recent Studies on Musical Creativity: A Review Three recent publications from Oxford University Press investigate many facets of musical creativity, spanning historical eras, musical genres and ensembles types, compositional and performance practices, and geographic regions. Each publication in its own way engages with the challenge of finding commonalities in creative processes that apply across all these distinguishing factors, while also maintaining an openness to variation and differentiation. In Becoming Creative: Insights from Musicians in a Diverse World, Juniper Hill postulates a key set of processes that characterize creative music-making. Synthesized from over 100 ethnographic interviews (the transcriptions of which totaled nearly 3500 pages) and interdisci-plinary applications of "ethnomusicology, education, sociology, psychology, and performance studies," (back cover) Hill examines these processes-generativity, agency, interaction, non-conformity, recycling, and flow-throughout the book in terms of "enablers and inhibitors," factors that contribute positively or negatively to musicians' ability to enact them. (p. 15) Her interlocutors were chosen from among musicians participating in the folk music, classical, and jazz scenes in Helsinki (Finland), Cape Town (South Africa), and Los Angeles (United States). Though Hill finds some commonalities across genre and geography (especially these six processes), she notes that significant differences arise among these case studies due to "varying degrees of ethnocultural diversity, internal differentiation of classical and wealth, state fund

Since 2009 my compositional practice has been shaped by a heightened awareness of the creative agency of the performer, evident chiefly through my adoption of indeterminate notation. The consequences of this decision have affected the expressive, technical and aesthetic aspects of my music leading to a much closer relationship with the experimental tradition than I could have conceived five years ago. This talk will take stock of these changes and reflect on them through recent scholarship in composition and performance creativity. It’s focus will be on Albumleaves (2013) for trumpet and string quartet, a large scale, open form work that constituted a ‘testing ground’ for experimental approaches new to me at the time. Trumpeter Simon Desbruslais will co-present, offering a performer’s perspective from which to interrogate the notions of performer creativity and freedom that informed the composition of Albumleaves. In common with all practice based research there has been an emergent quality to the knowledge Simon and I have acquired during our collaboration; we will not, therefore, seek to provide hard and fast conclusions but to produce insights into a practice sustained by an ongoing dialogue between the acts of composition and performance.

How does the knowledge generated in the practice and teaching room lead to effective performance beyond the routine and predictable? How do musicians develop their creative voice over time, and what learning and teaching techniques are most conducive to enhancing creative performance? Does musical creativity reside in the minds of individuals, in the end product of their endeavours, or might it be more meaningfully located in the social processes that underpin musical learning and music-making? These are the key questions addressed by this book, which brings together a stellar array of international scholars, both established academics and early-career researchers, from music psychology, music education, performance studies, and musicology. The book, which features sixteen chapters COPYRIGHT MATERIAL